technical-interviews
(11)
Mohit Bhende and the value of one more chance
Twelve colleges turned him down. Years later, the Karat co-founder helped make the second-chance interview part of the hiring process. His career runs through a literary magazine, Xbox, and a very well-used Honda.
AI is loud. TWIML listens.
Sam Charrington built a business around asking AI researchers how things actually work. The interesting part is what happened when his listeners started learning together.
The podcast that sends you back to work
The Cognitive Revolution turns long AI conversations into useful working knowledge. Its most telling review came from a founder who heard an interview and changed what his team tried next.
Vivek Ravisankar
Vivek Ravisankar is the co-founder and CEO of HackerRank, the technical hiring platform he started in 2012 after leaving a developer job at Amazon. Frustrated by the hours engineers lost to unstructured interviews, he and co-founder Hari Karunanidhi built a way to measure programming skill directly. After several pivots and three tries at Y Combinator, HackerRank grew into a platform used by thousands of companies and millions of developers. Ravisankar's stated mission is to build a meritocracy in hiring, where a developer's skills matter more than their school, geography, or resume brands.
FloCareer
FloCareer is an AI-powered and expert-led interviewing platform that lets companies outsource their hiring interviews at scale. Through its Interview-as-a-Service model it deploys a network of 8,000+ vetted industry interviewers (FloExperts), while its AI interviewer NIVO conducts automated screening and coding interviews around the clock. The company helps 700+ organizations run structured, proctored, unbiased interviews with fast turnaround, reducing recruiter load and time-to-hire.
CoderPad
CoderPad is a San Francisco-based technical interview and assessment platform that lets engineering teams evaluate developers in a real, runnable coding environment instead of on a whiteboard. Founded in 2013 by ex-Google and Amazon engineer Vincent Woo, it pairs live collaborative interviews with asynchronous take-home screens across 40+ programming languages, and has hosted millions of technical interviews for thousands of companies. In 2021 it acquired CodinGame to add candidate assessments and a developer skill-building community.
HackerRank
HackerRank is a technical skills platform that helps companies screen, interview, and hire developers based on what they can actually build rather than what their resume claims. Founded in 2009 by Vivek Ravisankar and Hari Karunanidhi, the company runs a two-sided model: a community where millions of developers practice coding challenges, and an enterprise product that lets 3,000+ companies - including a large share of the Fortune 100 - assess candidates with real-world coding tests, live pair-programming interviews, and, increasingly, AI-assisted evaluation and proctoring.
interviewing.io
interviewing.io is an anonymous mock technical interview platform and engineering hiring marketplace. Software engineers practice coding and system design with senior engineers from FAANG and frontier AI labs, then unlock real interviews with top companies based on performance, not resumes.
CodeSignal
CodeSignal is a San Francisco-based skills platform that uses AI-driven simulations to assess technical and soft-skills talent and to train workers through Cosmo, its conversational AI tutor. Founded in 2015 as CodeFights and rebranded in 2018, it now powers technical hiring and upskilling at companies like Meta, Netflix, Zoom, Robinhood and Capital One.
Sophie Novati
Sophie Novati is the CEO and co-founder of Formation, an A16Z-backed engineering fellowship that helps underrepresented software engineers break into top-tier tech companies. A Carnegie Mellon computer science graduate who rose to staff engineer at Facebook and Nextdoor, she founded Formation in 2019 after recognizing that talented engineers from non-traditional backgrounds were being systematically excluded from elite tech roles. Formation pairs adaptive AI-driven learning with mentorship from senior engineers, and its graduates have landed roles at Meta, Google, Netflix, Amazon, and Dropbox, with an average first-year compensation increase of over $100,000. The company has raised $9 million in funding and Novati credits a 2am chess game with Mark Zuckerberg as one early spark for thinking about business models.
Aline Lerner
Aline Lerner is the founder and CEO of interviewing.io, an anonymous technical interview platform that has hosted over 100,000 practice sessions and helped engineers get hired at companies like Facebook, Uber, Dropbox, and Lyft. A former MIT engineer who spent years as a professional cook before returning to tech, she ran hiring at Udacity, launched her own recruiting firm, and discovered through data that resume typos predicted candidate quality better than Ivy League credentials. Her data-driven writing on the dysfunction of technical hiring has been read by millions and featured in Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and Fast Company (which named her one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business in 2018). In January 2025, she co-authored Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview, the official sequel to the seminal CtCI book, co-written with Gayle Laakmann McDowell.